Category Archives: teaching and learning ingenuity

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This week a student in Erik Scollon‘s “Craft as Social Justice” course truly inspired me with her project on the ethics and aesthetics of mending. She used the ceramic gold-mending technique kintsugi as her central inspiration for a call to action that challenges her audience–artists and amateurs alike–to deploy their ingenuity to preserve and honor well-worn objects.

I spent much of the afternoon reflecting on ways I could apply this metaphor to my own life, highlighting and respecting inevitable cracks and fissures–in my own body, relationships, possessions, sociopolitical institutions–rather than attempting to conceal, reject, or ignore them. Kintsugi is about fixing things, yes, but it’s also about identifying ruptures and filling them with beauty.

As a digital storytelling activist I help people reclaim personal experiences, often tender ones, remaking them as attentively crafted, durable narratives. The tellers weave together fragments of memory stored in old photographs, crinkled love notes, scuffed boots. We call it storywork but it is also a form of kintsugi. Piecing together the past. Healing an old wound by telling the tale of the scar.

It is so natural, so tempting, to adopt kintsugi as a metaphor for living better in the new year ahead. But there are so many ruptures all around us. If we were to spend each day finding one precious thing and mending it we would never have time to make something new. And most precious things cannot be mended in a day. And mending doesn’t happen just once, especially not if the thing is returned to use. And preservation is about how we use things, not just about how we mend them.

So I wonder if perhaps what kintsugi is teaching me (today at least) is to focus not on the fissures or on the mending but on the gold. Perhaps the metaphor I need is that of beauty–or better yet, craftsmanship itself–as a way to bring people and things together.

First, that my job as a liberal arts educator is not merely about fostering genteel well-roundedness; rather, it’s about the urgent, essential work of teaching and learning interdisciplinary ingenuity. We don’t have time to wait for other people to be geniuses. We don’t have the luxury of patiently applauding other people seeking creative solutions to complex problems like ALS.

Second, that my best work is done as a catalyst, even though I’m still figuring out how to do it right. Elaine’s teaching method described in the video is in many ways what I hope to achieve through approaches like quadblogging–devoting more of the course to the students’ own processing of knowledge. On one level I’m having them experiment with digital tools because it’s practical and important to their digital literacy; on another level the digital communication projects are far more deeply about tapping into more parts of their brain through multimodal inquiry and reflection and composition. I want them to think and write in 4D, not just 2D or even 3D. I want them to master the art of extracting useful and inspiring knowledge from dense verbal sources (Emerson called this “creative reading,” yes?) as well as from other media, and I want them to generate new, actionable insights for themselves and for the rest of us.

Elaine’s interviewer asks her to share some advice to faculty. She says we should look at ourselves and our practices really honestly, because so much of traditional pedagogy tends to be about performance and even to some extent about ego-gratification. Perhaps what she means is that we’re distracted by our own desire for students to like and admire us–or perhaps we just love hearing ourselves talk about our favorite subjects.

In my teaching I tend to always want students making something or experiencing something. I want them to dig into raw materials and discover things that will delight or intrigue or inspire them. I try to use my speaking time to make sure they know everything we’re doing is on purpose, that a scaffold is in place to increase our odds of finding cool stuff, even though I can’t predict what it will be. It’s a different motivation than the infamous “sage on the stage” mindset but might my approach still be about ego? Yes, in some ways I think so. Because at the end of the day I want them to share my giddy enthusiasm for our work and my inflated sense of personal agency. I want us to cure ALS in Honors Comp 2.

Despite our semesters apart this blog has remained my touchstone because in so many ways it is about the intersections of digital and material culture. I’ve decided to make it my home base for this month’s participation in a MOOC (a massively open online course) on e-learning and digital culture facilitated through the University of Edinburgh. Last I heard there were 32,000 people enrolled in this course, with a few dozen of us interacting on facebook and now quad-blogging together. I’ll get into all that later.

For now I just wanted to pause and mark my return.

In the past year I’ve done a lot of hands-on exploring–learning much more about the materiality of literacy by making books, paper, and other fiber arts in OKC and, most wonderfully, at the Penland School of Crafts; messing around with clay; experimenting with more digital storytelling tools (had a great experience at the Center for Digital Storytelling). I spent more time pounding the pavement and pondering the relationship between artifacts and public memory in Singapore, NYC, and OKC. 2012 was an interesting year. In 2013 I’d like to bring more of it into focus–for myself, for my students, and for anyone else who might make use of what we’re learning.

As much as I genuinely appreciate the digital ethnography work done by Wesch and his students, I’m irritated by the smugness of this video–the sense that it’s somehow OK for students to dismiss books and classroom lectures as irrelevant so long as antiquated pedagogies take the blame.

I say all this, yet supposedly I’m one of the “good guys”: I teach small classes where we mostly sit in circles and discuss current events and view wacky-but-insightful websites and interrogate visual literacy and collaborate with community organizations doing field work and hands-on curatorial work and writing and arts-integrated experimental learning . . . yadda yadda yadda . . . . Like I said, my classroom is not the sort directly critiqued by the video.

And yet . . . And yet I just spent 3 hours reading a book on metaphor theory–a densely written, scholarly text with almost no pictures. I had to retrain my brain to concentrate on the writing, sometimes reading passages to my slumbering dog and using colored pencils to sketch out the complex ideas unfolding in the text. And it was glorious. If I assigned this book my students might not read it unless I somehow coaxed them through it and helped them read it page by page. My personal techniques with the colored pencils and so forth could serve as models but ultimately learning from the reading of dense text is about sitting down and wanting to figure out your own methods for learning from words. According to Wesch’s students (and they’re probably right) most of my students would not read the book just because I assigned it–even if class discussions and reading responses were part of the assignment my students might not read the whole book but rather just enough portions to get the gist of it. Does that mean my students are lazy or does it mean that they’re savvy consumers of text? Neither. That’s my point. That’s my dilemma.

Of course, I could assign more interesting texts. And shorter texts. And texts composed as comic books. And podcasts. Yes I do all those things. But I’m still not convinced that reading 8 or fewer books per year is OK, or that I’m a good teacher if I exhibit empathy for students who believe books are an outdated source of relevant knowledge or entertainment.

We’re living in this transitional phase where highly motivated teachers are doing everything we can imagine to navigate the space between how students want to learn and what we believe they need to learn. (Notice I didn’t say the gap is between how they want to learn and how we want to teach. I’m operating under the assumption that we want to teach in whatever way will help them learn. An attachment to a particular pedagogy is not necessarily the problem here. I also didn’t say the gap is between what they want to learn and what we want to teach–though I do believe that’s part of the dilemma.)

One of the things I believe they need to learn is how to actively (not passively) learn–and active learning doesn’t only mean being entertained and engaged by the learning; it also means deliberately doing the learning. Among the things teachers like me need to learn are: how to teach them to be (and to want to be) active, deliberate learners of things–even things that might not appear to be immediately relevant to their personal lives; also we need to learn what is most important for them to learn–what things will spark their desire to learn more on their own, and how can we best equip them (intellectually, personally, and otherwise) to do that digging on their own?

So what does any of this have to do with books? A lot.

My background is in rhetoric and composition studies. I believe that writing helps us learn. I believe that reading helps us learn. For a dozen-odd years I’ve taught writing in ways that I hoped would help students learn. The raison d’etre of academic writing is that it helps students to learn what they’re studying and to communicate they’ve learned it. We don’t teach academic writing so that students will do academic writing for the rest of their lives (unless they become academicians). We teach academic writing because it helps students synthesize, interrogate, articulate, and otherwise engage and demonstrate what they’re learning. Reading good scholarly writing helps them get better at it. Reading any kind of writing generally helps them get at least somewhat better at doing their own writing. In turn, getting better at writing typically entails getting better at thinking through one’s ideas, composing them coherently, demonstrating knowledge. Our great hope is that compulsive Facebooking and texting will somehow also enable students to remain sufficiently literate (as readers and as writers and thinkers) to continue strengthening their abilities to digest, interrogate, communicate, and demonstrate knowledge derived from non-Facebook sources.

I’m a reasonably optimistic person. I’m willing to set aside my Postman-esque concerns about Farmville and Twilight and so forth for now.

So it’s within that context that I’m beginning this thought experiment: What if the purpose of first-year composition isn’t to teach academic writing? This isn’t a new question, really. Lots of us in rhet/comp do multimodal composition pedagogy–meaning we have integrated visual literacy and digital composition into our writing courses. What might be different about my thought experiment is that I’m removing the words altogether. If the purpose of the first-year composition course is to help students locate, synthesize, and demonstrate knowledge, could that be done entirely through the kinds of 3D assemblage my visual rhetoric students did last spring? Or via a primarily visual composition with a spoken or written explanation? Or via a community-engaged, applied learning project accompanied by reflection that might be spoken or written or sung?

The answer is No, to the extent that first-year composition is a service course to other academic disciplines expecting us to teach MLA/APA citation formats and grammar and the writing of literature reviews. But if our goal is to teach the acquisition of knowledge and the synthesis of ideas–would it become our job to teach composition as a cognitive act as well as a communication task? Would it require us all to learn how composition–the arrangement of information–connects with the acquisition and transmission of knowledge in all its forms?

The academic year resumed and I dropped off-blog. I need to spend the next week or so catching up with the comments and reintegrating this writing into my day-to-day life. (Easier done once final grades are in.)

I’m wrapping up a spring first-year writing course with the theme “Genius” in which I attempted to establish a flexible space for exploring connections between academic writing, reflection, and the kinds of ingenuity that inspire us. I hoped that such an approach would enable my students and me to explore deeper and more diverse ways that a liberal arts education can help us tap our own creative potential.

As the years pass–I’ve now been teaching at this institution over 8 years–I find myself more committed than ever to the principle that what we do in first-year courses absolutely must include stimulating the creativity of our students. Some who share my commitment call it “critical thinking” rather than creativity. So be it. I’m using the word creativity right now because I need to emphasize a kind of openness, resourcefulness, ingenuity . . . playfulness too. These things aren’t always encompassed in definitions or discussions about “critical” thinking. What I’m looking for includes joyful discovery and an expectation of/faith in serendipity.

We don’t have time to wait for other people to be creative. We have diseases that need to be cured, an environment to heal, life-spans to extend, cycles of ignorance and brutality to halt and transform. We can’t think of ourselves as “not creative” for doing so just perpetuates our own mediocrity. This all seems so obvious to me and yet all around me I see people who may, at best, purchase tickets to a performance or watch a nifty video on YouTube. Art-integration is approached too passively, if at all. People keep missing the connection between art and personal agency. They miss opportunities to pay closer attention to what they see and how it might connect to their own lives and work and vision for the world.

There are so many things I would do differently with the “Genius” course next time around.

One thing that nags me is the sense that I didn’t do a good enough job of fostering ways for students to make meaningful connections between the creatives they admired and their own lives. We spent too much time wrestling with the notion of what “genius” is and looks like, not enough time doing things that would enable them to experiment with their own ways of knowing.

What’s leading me back to it, I think, is my current situation: the semester is ending; I’m planning to take more art classes over the summer. One in design, another in sculpture, probably some more weaving. I’m exposing myself to as many media and techniques as possible so that during the school year, when any art-making must come from my own time and talent (such as it is) I’ll be better able to realize my vision. There are things I need to make, compositions in 3D that have been calling me and that I just need to complete–get them out of my head and here on the table. But my skill set is limited. Heh. Not as limited as it was last year, though!

What studio artists and artisans have that everyday people don’t is this: an ability to conceive of copious, diverse uses for things beyond the customary ones. I’ve discussed this before elsewhere. The resourcefulness thing. Into that category of artists and artisans I would like to add engineers, mechanics, chemists, nurses, cooks . . . people who do problem-solving in three dimensions. I emphasize artists because they are trained to think imaginatively at a level that most others aren’t. It’s their job to create something astonishing out of nothing. It’s an intensification of creative purpose, almost an urgency. Musicians don’t just make sounds; they make music. It’s OK for them to just make nice music. But to some degree the musician won’t feel like she’s really doing her job if all the music she ever makes is merely nice or merely an accurate reproduction of the notes in an arrangement.

As someone who works with first-year college students every year within a liberal arts institution–the kind of place intended above all others to cultivate intellectual versatility for the betterment of our world–I can’t ignore the opportunity (heck, the civic responsibility) to develop courses that do their share to construct the scaffolding needed for further creative inquiry. My field, rhetoric and composition, is rooted in the western academic heritage. And yet I still worry about appearing to neglect the teaching of writing in order to do the teaching of thinking. I want to do a better job of teachings style and grammar–but those things aren’t all that I teach. I’m not teaching functional literacy; if anything, I’m teaching academic literacy. Academic literacy is about knowing why you are researching something, why you are writing about it, how it could matter (or not) and to whom. It’s also about preparing yourself to do consequential work as a researcher and writer–learning how to draw upon what’s known and make something new or different from it, and to generate more worth knowing.